I haven’t written a whole lot lately, because most of the things I’m trying to process are unfit for publication. You would think that I would have no shame in this area, and I don’t. It’s just that I can’t tell others’ stories, only my own. The people I want to write about have specifically said to wait, so you’ll hear it eventually, just not “write” now. #baitedbreath

The long and short of it is that I feel hampered in a major way, because writing is how I calm myself, how I understand the world… but I also don’t want to hurt anyone by revealing information I specifically said I’d keep quiet for now.

What I can say is that I have a lot on my plate, literally and figuratively. I’ve had to eat a lot of ice cream lately. Ben & Jerry are saving me one pint at a time. Day before yesterday, it was Banana Split ice cream. I went for broke, when my normal flavor is Cherry Garcia Frozen Yogurt… to the point where Cherry Garcia ice cream tastes weird to me. There’s also a scoop shop close to me, so I have tried Empowermint, and it’s good, but not any different than any other mint chocolate chip. My favorite at the sccop shop is Chocolate Therapy, but not necessarily because of the flavor. I like the texture of the pudding against the ice cream. I wish they’d make more flavors with pudding in them, like lemon meringue pie… but no one asked me.

This is all just filler for what I wish I could say, but sufficed to say my life is coming apart at the seams. I briefly considered moving back to Houston, but not for any reason you’d think of in a million years. It has nothing to do with the Argo situation, nothing to do with my happiness here, and everything to do with what I can’t say when I wish I could. You’ll know in time, and hopefully your support will coming pouring in the way it always has.

I’ve told Bryn and Aaron what’s going on, and for now, that is enough. As predicted, they were supportive with virtual hugs and kisses, desperately needed. I wish Danni was back already, but I’ll e-mail her later. If you’re friends with me in real life and want to know how to help, drop me a line. I could use it.

The thought of moving back to Houston was a knee-jerk reaction, and lasted all of about five minutes. Because moving to Houston always *seems* like a good idea right up until I get there. It’s been like that for years. I cannot escape my past, and now there’s just so much more of it because I’ll be 39 in a little less than a month. My 36th birthday was the turning point, and how I realized I would never be happy there unless there were extenuating circumstances that required me to be there. For instance, I’d never abandon my family if they were in need of my support. And even then, I wouldn’t be happy. I’d just choose to focus on everything but living there. I can write from anywhere, and if there’s anything that the friendship with Argo proved to me, it was that I could live in Houston and completely escape it at the same time.

I could just live in the cloud and ignore the ground, because I don’t have anything tying me to it. It would be a shitty solution to a problem, but perhaps good enough.

For now, though, I need to stay put. The job market is better here for tech people than it is in Houston, and the last thing I want to do is move to a place where the job search would eat my lunch the moment I got there. I’d be waiting tables or working in a grocery store and I won’t go back to that life unless I have to make room for school, and even then, that would be quite a stretch, because I only have enough to cover one semester, so I really need to keep up full-time work so I can cover more than that.

I just met a guy wearing a Fedora oxford and I am so jealous I could spit. I think they need to change the logo, though. If it were a woman, it would look just like Carmen Sandiego. 😛

Remind me never to get an iced drink at Starbucks if I’m going to write here, because OH MY GOD AM I COLD. The air conditioner must be pumped down to 68.

And on that note, I think that’s all for today. If I think of something else important, I’ll see you later.

Last night, I took myself on a somewhat great date… the exception being that I was going to go to a movie with me and the picture I wanted to see had started 25 minutes before. Now, if I had bothered to look up the movie time, I could have made it. I thought I’d just show up and see what was playing next, and as it turns out, close to 8:00 doesn’t really work for anything. There were two or three things that I wanted to see, but the one that was at the top of my list was “Florence Foster Jenkins.” The great part of my date was going to Z Pizza Tap Room, because I was able to get vegan pizza (my favorite because I love Daiya cheese and “sorta sausage” with lots of veggies) and my version of a Snakebite- Angry Orchard cider and a porter made in Alexandria… had to try it… my old “home town.” The sad part was that I could have used some humor, and hearing the REAL Florence Foster Jenkins when I was a teenager singing the Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute made me laugh so hard that tears and snot ran down my face and I was shaking so hard that no sound would come out. She does get some of the notes…..

After I finished my pizza and discovered I didn’t want to wait around for a 9:00 movie, I went to Cold Stone Creamery, where I had a scoop of ice cream that was half Rum Raisin, half Banana and mixed with walnuts. I should have asked for mostly banana with a spoonful of Rum Raisin, because the rum flavor was so loud the banana was lost. It was still delicious, though.

And last but not least, while I was eating at Z Pizza, I got a message from an old friend, Scoop, so named because she’s a journalist @ Politico, on OK Cupid. I’d basically sent her a message that said, “I was just poking around on here and clicked on your name because it said you were also from Texas and HOLY SHIT! I KNOW HER! That was months ago and she finally wrote back, because as she says, “you see how often I check this…” I don’t remember how Kathleen and I met her, just that we didn’t grow up in Houston together or anything. We met her here, decked out in every possible piece of clothing you could buy at University of Texas.

Anywho, I asked her if she wanted to meet me for a movie in Silver Spring. She doesn’t live that far away- somewhere in PG County- and she sent back a flirt that went straight over my head… and when she said that it was a lame flirt because she was rusty at it, I said, “you don’t want to date me. I’m a hot mess. You should flirt with Claudia Schiffer.” I love a good “Love Actually” reference.

I’m flattered, but I don’t want to date anyone because “hot mess” is accurate.

But it was nice to have two scoops.

This morning as I was driving in to work, I listened to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, in which they were discussing one of my favorite TV shows, Steven Universe. It is not a standalone cartoon, but a deep and winding mythology that crosses all kinds of lines, from gender to sexual orientation to alien to human. It makes me happy that in the modern world in which we live, there are cartoons with lesbian characters… when I look at them, I see me.

I also see Dana, and I cry. In fact, I cried on the way into work today, because the commentators were talking about how Ruby and Sapphire are a lesbian couple that fuse together to become Garnet (the aliens are called “Gems”), and they sing this song about how they are so much better together than they are apart, and I could not even.

That’s because I was reminded last night of one of our truly funny Facebook conversations in the “Memories” section.

Here’s my status update:

I had the best coffee yesterday- called the “Indivisible Blend” at Starbucks. It tastes like rich malt, maybe a Shiner Bock without the twang of alcohol? It is so good that it needs neither sugar nor cream. Just itself. I pledge allegiance to this coffee, and to the delicious flavor profile for which it stands.

Here is Dana’s response:

One coffee, under Howard, with Ventis and Grandes for all!

We used to have a running joke about starting a book called “Bleep My Wife Says,” and I am seriously sorry I never got around to it. For instance, there’s this hilarious story:

Leslie: I really love taking Willow with me when I go places, because I don’t feel alone (she was our foster dog for a while).
Dana: Plus, she’s also really fun to play “Slug Bug” with because she doesn’t hit back.
Leslie: Have you been beating our dog?
Dana: ………………….

I talk a big game in terms of dating, but I have to look at my words vs. my actions. Every time someone has wanted to meet up with me, I’ve said I wanted to meet them as a friend. That would last two or three outings before they’d want to start dating and I ran away. The drugs I’m taking coupled with enormous grief leave my libido in the toilet, so not only do I not want to date, I’m not sure I’m physically capable of it. Romance doesn’t occur to me at all, and I’ve had a grand total of two real dates since I got here, and then I freaked and realized I wasn’t ready. I don’t trust easily, especially myself. I really hurt both Dana and Argo, and I feel like I owe it to them to really get over what it was that made me capable of hurting them in the first place before I unleash myself on anyone else.

Again, it was irrelevant that Argo didn’t have feelings for me. I only cared what it was doing to me on the inside, the way I lashed out at her to get her to leave because I didn’t have the stomach to “man up” and say, “this is too much for me” a second time. I did the first time we “friend broke up,” just took a machete to my own heart and tried to live with it, and I just couldn’t. We were back in contact relatively quickly after that, because I couldn’t bear to see her hurt that I’d packed up my toys and gone home.

So I did everything in my power to help her make the decision to “friend break up” with me. It was shitty and childish and totally out-of-character for me, but at the time, I was barely holding on emotionally with Dana’s insistence that Argo was in love with me and couldn’t express it, and the ridiculousness that surrounded it. It was crazymaking, and all I wanted in the world was for Dana to see the absolute truth, that Argo has female friends that she treats like sisters, but would never cross a romance boundary with me, ever… it wouldn’t even occur to her to do so, and the idea that she was a threat to my relationship with Dana was completely laughable. We both wanted to shake Dana until she remembered what was real.

Crossing the romance boundary for me had nothing to do with thinking that Argo was any smarter, more beautiful, etc. than Dana. It came out of pure sapiosexuality, the part of my brain where smart, capable and confident creates attraction because she was sincerely overclocking my processor. I was thinking about bigger things than I ever had before, and Argo’s ability to make that happen for me reached inside my soul and extracted a piece that I thought I’d never find. It was absolutely the reason that I wanted the relationship to end, because at the time, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror every morning. Feeling these excited feelings for two women at the same time created feelings in me that I wasn’t making bad decisions, I was a bad person, and there’s a big difference.

There was nothing in my history that modeled deep female friendship without that element of excitement, even with straight girls, because even though those wires would never physically cross, that didn’t mean that I didn’t have my own feelings about them… it’s just that with the others, I was single and therefore, doing all my processing without offending the one person in my life that should have gotten all my attention… the one I was married to, the one to which I’d pledged my allegiance and committment and a new family that differentiated us from our first families, as hard as that was to execute and enforce.

There are so many things I wish I’d done differently, but I can’t change the past. But that doesn’t erase regret that I carry with me in what seems like the proverbial “albatross around my neck.” I am slowly walking away from it, but a relationship that lasted over a decade doesn’t seem like something I can or should get over quickly… as if I can just put it in a box and walk away… because those feelings will keep resurfacing until I resolve them, and writing helps. I can wrap a lot of things in “Oh God, I never meant to hurt you the way I did,” but that doesn’t mean jack or shit in terms of the future. Argo’s words reverberate in my head every day… the first sentence being that the price of friendship with you is too high, and the second being that not a day goes by that I am not filled with regret at letting you into my life. I can only hope that she was just as angry as I was in the moment, and that those words are not gospel truth. If they are, it sickens me to an enormous degree because there have been so many good moments between us that I’d feel wrecked if they didn’t carry any weight. We are both verbally vicious to an enormous degree, and I can’t help but think that neither of us could have been nearly as awful to the other in person. But that is not for this lifetime unless a miracle occurs, one in which I cannot hope for or imagine because it hurts too much. What I can hope for is that as time goes by, she’ll be able to look back with different eyes, not to rekindle friendship, but to see that everything wasn’t all bad.

What I have begun to see is that the price of friendship with her is too high for me, because she gave me an open line to say whatever I wanted and, without telling me, began keeping a file on what she viewed as harassment… something I would have liked to have known because I didn’t realize I didn’t have that open line anymore and everything I said was taken as threat, when none of the things I said flowed from that place. It seemed like a short leash from “there’s nothing that you could say that would make me like/love you any less,” and if I’d known how uncomfortable she’d become, I would have changed my behavior to match, and in fact, did.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that she did, and I just missed it. I miss a lot when I’m not looking for it, especially since our relationship ran so hot and cold that I focused on the hot and ignored the cold altogether. In a lot of ways, I never knew which Argo was going to show up, and I am sure she would say the same about me. We were both these moving targets of emotion where neither of us knew how to find “home base,” the hallmark of a toxic relationship that was both of our faults and neither. We are both products of our environment, like all people. Because neither of us knew each other on the ground, it was easy to trip over childhood landmines because we didn’t know where they were… and even in the midst of all that, healing took place… and then we ripped it to shreds so that we were more fucked up than when we began. Over time, healthy reactions were beyond us, because it was easy to send both love and hate when you can’t see the other person’s face.

Dana and Argo were the faces I looked to for love, one on the ground, and one in the cloud. As I have said before, I chose the ground because I could see it. And then I’d read something I’d want to share with Argo and the confusion started all over again. I felt like I literally couldn’t walk away, and I didn’t want to, but it was necessary. It’s the only thing that would have given Dana peace, and if there’s anything I wish I could have given her, it’s that.

I hope that peace is being achieved by not communicating with Argo, not making things worse, but the awful part is not making anything better, either. My wires aren’t crossed anymore, and I miss her every day in the fullness of friendship and not the brokenness of being emotionally attached to something the relationship will never be able to sustain.

To paraphrase Emily Saliers, I wish I could bring her heart back to my island, but the sand beneath me has already slipped, and that just has to be all right. I don’t really have a choice. What is done is done. I for damn sure don’t want to fall back into old patterns over the internet, and the chance of her actually wanting to look at my face as we talked is a large negative integer.

So I focus on Danni, Traci, Kim, Sam, and all of the other friends I’ve met in real time that don’t have a history with me of taking things out of context and blowing up over them… on both sides of the equation. They are the faces I can literally look to for love, instead of just hoping that pictures become real.

I also wish that Dana could see me, really see me, but that is not for this lifetime, either. I can only take the lessons that I’ve learned from that relationship and try like hell not to be that person to anyone else. But again, I hope that with the passage of time, she’ll remember the good parts, too.

Nothing is ever all bad. Not even me.

Here’s the song I mentioned above…………….

I made my own coffee this morning, French Roast from SBUX. I don’t know why. Usually I feel I need to be in a coffee shop to feel in the right mood to write, which is why I leave so early in the morning. But yesterday was such a day from hell that I was practically asleep before my head hit the pillow at 2100, and this morning woke up 20 minutes before my alarm (0540 for those who are keeping score).

I left my notes on HIPAA at home, so I came home to retrieve them and take the test. I flunked it three times in a row. I was so confident about it because I knew the material cold, and finally I called the testing agency to see if there was something wrong with my computer. This is because there were java applets in the course that would not run, and I thought that some of the information I’d missed might be contained in them. The person on the phone told me I’d missed questions in the same section over and over, and that he would reach out to the instructor of the course.

She called me back and said that the online course did cover the material, but not in-depth, that there was a 400-page manual I didn’t get with the online course… and just basically “this online course covers everything, except it doesn’t.” She said she would give me the class and the exam for free if I could make it to San Diego in September. Right now I’m in the process of trying to get money back from the testing company based on what the instructor told me. There’s no reason I shouldn’t have passed that test if I was literally copying down the slides verbatim and memorizing them… otherwise, I wouldn’t have been confident enough to sit through the exam three times in one day.

It should have been a tip-off that the exam questions were nothing like the practice exam given on the training web site. You had to get at least 80% of the practice questions right in order to pass it, and I did (they won’t give you your exact score, only PASS/FAIL). Apparently, I got at least 5% dumber in like, half an hour.

I am not one of those people who cannot take responsibility for failing. I know when I’ve put in the work and when I haven’t. If I’d blown off the training and not taken notes, I wouldn’t have been surprised that I failed. The surprise was poring over the materials for days and still failing. I am blaming the online course materials because the instructor literally said that it wasn’t the same as the course I would have taken in person, and that there was a whole bunch of material I didn’t get. It also hurts not to know exactly how much I did get right, and how close (or not) I was to passing.

The instructor promised that there was no way I’d fail if I just came to her class in person, but I have other stuff that my boss wants me to work on, so I doubt it will happen. It’s nice that she gave it to me for free, though… and sad that I was so confident at the amount I studied that I was willing to fork over $800 of my own money to prove that I had indeed learned the material that was given to me. I don’t expect my boss to pay for the tests I flunked. If we get the money back from the testing company, that’s enough.

I am incredibly hard on myself when it comes to studying. I learned how to digest material by taking Con Law in college- writing down everything I possibly could so that I didn’t have to be connected to the Internet to study… because studying while connected to the Internet is a bad idea entirely. I mean, I don’t like cat videos (sue me), so there’s that. But there are no end to other distractions.

Speaking of cat videos, I like cats a lot. I’ve had three that I’ve loved beyond all measure. But I like playing with them in person, not watching other people’s. I am also not a cat mom. That shit drives me insane. A cat is not a child to me, and to compare them is ludicrous. I have owned cats. I have not babied them. They don’t seem to care.

I have also never been a “dog mom,” but a dog owner. That doesn’t mean I put them out in the backyard and forget about them. They’re members of my family, but have never and will never have the same status as any child I adopt, have, acquire as step-children, etc.

This is a huge tangent to get me off of the fact that I am desperately sad I flunked an exam that I spent days studying for, and that all of it is for naught. It’s just fucking depressing to an enormous degree, because I am smarter than this. But I cannot help but feel that the deck was stacked against me no matter what I did. The instructor even said that the online course was designed for people who already had a background in HIPAA, and that the part I learned while working in a doctor’s office was barely covered in the material. It was mostly laws passed and when, as well as what clauses fall under each section. The course was not laid out that way, so there was no way to know which sections fell under the Final Omnibus Rule and which fell under the Security Rule, etc… and yet, that’s the way that the test was set up. There were also trick questions reminiscent of Ken Wall (great guy, evil Con Law tests) that said, “choose the MOST correct answer.” And those were tests on which I got one C the entire semester and all As on the others… and passed the final with 102. However, what KWall had working in his favor was that he told us his tests were evil up front. 😛

I am reminded of when I went with Dana to her allergist when she got hives, and the nurse left her workstation unlocked so that I could have pwnd her computer in a hot second. I didn’t, but I should have called the Office of Civil Rights and made a formal complaint, because anyone can do that. If you see a HIPAA violation, report it. This was a blatantly obvious mistake, because not only did I have access to Dana’s medical records, I had access to everyone in that system. It is only because I am a true White Hat that I didn’t peek… just noted their abject stupidity, because I could have gotten into billing as well.

I was just too worried about Dana to make reporting the HIPAA violation a thing.

I can’t help but think that I am partly responsible for those hives, because they are brought on by stress, and we were under a lot of it. I just remember crying in the allergist’s office because as I have said before, it was like watching my baby get a Vitamin K shot in her heel and hearing cries of anguish.

I am strong, but not that unbreakable.

When you go to see an IMAX movie, a real one and not a Hollywood movie, they make an announcement that if you get motion sick, just close your eyes, and the feeling should pass.

Though Dana shouldn’t have had to wait around for me to deal with the enormity of my feelings for Argo to pass into manageable friendship and getting away from sharing secrets that made me want to fix everything, it would have helped if Dana had closed her eyes, and waited for my feelings to pass, because they did indeed. Feeling like I was “in love” with Argo’s brain didn’t last nearly as long as trying to put dirt into the hole I’d dug, but when you break something, it is damn near impossible to put it back together again… and I mean that in the most sincere way with both of them. I just ran out of time, and we each said things to each other that pushed us away instead of closer together.

Regret and shame is a recurring theme, because I don’t want to be that person anymore. I was so anxious I couldn’t breathe, because everything was slipping through my fingers. Just everything. Starting over was my only option, because there was no way that either one of them was truly going to give me another chance, especially when Argo laid it out for me that I was never going to get away from her feeling that I was this dark and twisty character even as I tried in so many ways to try and get her to smile.

In our last fight ever, and should be, she escalated a conversation and I fucking lost it, a place I never wished to go and couldn’t really help because I do not have the emotional tools to deal with being threatened, especially when I feel that things are unjust.

Being an INFJ, it’s the judging part that eats my lunch, and probably why both of them have said that being in relationship with me is “too hard.” It’s a shitty place to be when the people you love the most say that about you, as if I am terminally unlovable. I worked hard on proving that I am not unlovable, that I have dark and twisty moments because of all my PTSD, but that doesn’t mean I don’t also have redeeming and awesome qualities. I don’t think I’ve ever been so broken, so angry, so depressed… because while their negative opinions swirled around me, I could only think of the blessings they’d brought into my life and wanting to give them big thank-yous all around that were rejected in a hot second.

I have no hope whatsoever that Argo will see this in me, because her feelings are her feelings and she is entitled to them, but losing Dana is a never-ending battle for me because she has known me, loved me, for over a decade. I am wrecked that Dana stopped seeing the good in me, because there were so many years of it.

Ones that I remember when I feel horrible that I’ve failed… in more ways than one.

I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me until now. I get free refills on coffee and tea. Therefore, I have decided that Venti is Italian for “too lazy to get up.” I’m not cheap, just practical. Any money I save at SBUX is money I can spend on something else. I mean, for God’s sakes… it’s coffee. Good coffee, but water and beans nonetheless. I was going to stay home and have a Bulletproof, but I decided I wanted a protein box instead. It’s fruit, cheese, peanut butter, a hard-boiled egg, and a raisin roll. Sometimes I spread the peanut butter on the roll, and sometimes I dip my apples in it. It’s all about options, people. The dark roast is caramelly and sweet even without cream, called Kopelanai. I don’t know the origin, but I might find out when I get up for a refill.

There is a baby sitting across from me wearing aviator sunglasses, and it’s about the cutest thing I’ve seen in weeks. Nothing like a baby to get my day going, because BABIES ARE AWESOME… especially with sunglasses that make her look like Tom Cruise in Top Gun. The music is hopping today, too. Kind of lounge with a beat, reminicent of an album series that Kathleen fell in love with called “Cocktail Hour” or similar…

I have so much to do when I get to the office. I got bogged down in a project for my non-profit that I didn’t have time to work on anything else. It was production work, so I couldn’t help but put the other things off, but I wish I’d been able to stay late last night and get a little further ahead… but we work from 9:00-600. The doors don’t open before then, and I don’t want to get locked in… although there’s a couch in the waiting room that is infinitely comfortable. 😛

I also have to carve out some time to look at my notes and take my HIPAA exam, which will probably happen Wednesday, because my Tuesday is booked. I am eager to get it over with, because if I don’t get 75% of the material right, it’s another $3-400 to re-take. I know enough about HIPAA that I shouldn’t be too worried, but I am by nature a worrier. If I pass, however, and keep up my certification, it will allow me to command a higher salary should I ever leave the job I’m in now. This is not an option now, and won’t be for a long time because I really enjoy where I landed, but it’s comforting nonetheless. The cert is renewed every two years, because the laws keep getting changed and molded to fit the new realities of hardcore hacking, and just how valuable medical information is, especially credit card and social security numbers.

I personally don’t worry about security in the slightest. I know I’ve been hacked, am sure of it, and once Dana accidentally gave my passport to Goodwill. I don’t have private information. I just have information now. And especially since I use Linux, I’m already on some sort of watch list, as if using linux is a gateway drug to hacking… because most people don’t know the difference between hacking and cracking, anyway. Hacking is in the same vein as “life hacks,” engineering software to make it better. Cracking is breaking into a system just to fuck shit up for the joy of it… mostly 13-year-old script kiddies who have nothing better to do than to see if they can bring down the DoD or Bank of America just for “fun.” Although, to be fair, nine times out of ten it is incredibly easy… and not because I’ve tried. It’s because people choose passwords that are easy to break and security measures that take no more than a day or two to break. Your best defense against cracking is a very long and involved password… not that people can’t get past it, but to make it where encryption programs take so long to break it that crackers just give up and move on to someone else.

Use passphrases instead of passwords. For instance, D0nald Trump 1s a j@ackass! works quite nicely. You’re welcome.

In terms of Windows passwords, I’m not sure you can use a passphrase, so I tend to take people’s names and put them into hacker-speak, like L3sl!eL!. That’s not my password for anything, just an example. I was born on a Saturday, but it wasn’t last Saturday.

Last night I slept without dreaming, because I was playing games on my phone and realized I was ruminating about Argo and Dana and didn’t want to keep that up all fucking night. As I have said before, grief is so weird. Losing them at my own hand does not make this any easier, and in fact, makes it harder, because I have so many sins for which to atone. I think I have made progress, though, because as I was drifting off, I got a letter from Argo and my response was, “I love you dearly, but no.” Of course, if I got a real e-mail from Argo and it was genuine, I probably wouldn’t say that, but what I do know is that the way I thought about her months ago is gone. I see her differently now, probably in the same way that she sees me differently, too. She told me once that she’d “lost the faith,” and I can say the same… Perhaps because even though I try every day to be the person that God wants me to be, that does not mean I don’t have my human, fallible moments that take me further away from God instead of closer, because there are some moments when I don’t want to face God with my iniquities, either. I want to pretend that everything is fine, and it just isn’t.

There’s nothing I can do to resolve the situation except pray for her every day, because it doesn’t change her, but it changes me. She is not my enemy, nor is she my cheerleader. When she is, it’s the face I make up for her and not in any way connected to reality. It’s just comforting in the face of enormous grief. I cannot even begin to tell you how awful I feel, and in time, I hope to accept myself in the face of being unacceptable, again to quote Paul Tillich. The bottom line is that we fucked each other up, but I cannot own her half… and actually, I’ll own way more than half. But the bottom line is that we both scared each other for different reasons, and it caused both of us to fight, flight, and freeze. I can only hope that not communicating is giving us both the peace we need, but if there is anything I wish I had back, it’s that chord between us that is able to send her my prayers and attaboys, because she truly is the badass I’ve always wanted in my life and never thought I’d get. It doesn’t matter to me what form that love takes, only that I used to have it and now I don’t.

But the main thing is that I am not lonely for her words anymore. I have a tapestry to look back on, and when I feel bad about myself, I go back to the beginning and look at all of our laughter. Nothing more needs to be said because I don’t want to create more pain in which we each have to get over. I am having a hard enough time with the actions we’ve both taken already. I don’t know when my feelings stopped mattering, but it can’t matter to me. I can only hang on to the friends I’ve made since I’ve been here, especially since Pri-Diddy and Elena have moved away.

Danni just sent me a text with her Moscow e-mail address, and I can’t wait to use it. And she will, in fact, be back for my birthday, which rocks like a geologist. I wish I could bring Bryn out as well, but her sister is getting married that weekend, and guess who’s doing the wedding?

Fuck me running. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Bryn, I assume she reads my blog. That’s enough. Don’t let her in. I know you know that already. But it never hurts to say it out loud, because saying it out loud makes it real. Susan is doing the wedding, of course, but that doesn’t mean that Diane won’t try to get information out of you if she can. She has a history of it, like going to visit Dana at work trying to get my contact information and being surprised when Dana wouldn’t give it to her without asking me if it was okay. I am very okay with loving her from waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over here. She doesn’t deserve me, but I won’t put away the rich tapestry of our past. That’s just crazymaking for me, like throwing away all the good stuff with the bad. If I focus on the bad, it’s just a rumination… stuck in a moment I can’t get out of.

We’ve had our Bloody Sunday. It’s over, and it will never go back together. But again, I don’t love her because it changes her, I love her because it changes me. More love, more forgiveness, more releasing of the past because then I can’t let it torture me.

I am stronger than I ever thought I would be, getting away from all the women that for me have divided time, both for evil and for awesome.

Though Argo is under my skin, shallow and subcutaneous, Dana runs much deeper, this river of emotion that isn’t ready to bubble up because I need more time to think, more time to remember, more time to focus on all of our laughter instead of our tears. Because if I can do that, divorce doesn’t torture me, either.

It’s how I am taking my pain and turning it into promise, no matter how long it takes.

Our Old Testament reading is the beginning of a major theological shift on God’s part, or, in the “taking the Bible seriously but not literally” sense, a change in the way people reacted to God. It says in the words of Isaiah that God is tired of being given sacrifices, literally watching the blood of the animals run down (I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats), and gives a speech to God’s people that is worthy of committing to memory:

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings
from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.
Come now, let us argue it out,
says the Lord:
though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be like snow;
though they are red like crimson,
they shall become like wool.
If you are willing and obedient,
you shall eat the good of the land;
but if you refuse and rebel,
you shall be devoured by the sword;
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard God say anything more loving and giving of equality than “come now, let us argue it out.” There are other parts of the Bible in which God gives up his omniscience/omnipotence, but not in these exact words. We are given an invitation not only to plead our case, but to get angry. To be sad. To confide all our shortcomings and iniquities in hopes of a better tomorrow than the today we’ve barely managed. To be able to stop trying to please God and to have a deeper relationship and understanding of it. For people-pleasers (and I include myself in that group), this verse is a Godsend (see what I did there?)

In short, God is inviting us to put down the mask of perfect and pick up the mantle of human… because the mask of perfect is to hide the sins for which we are ashamed and bring God only the most pleasing aspects of ourselves, without really taking it in that God can see past it in a second. Because what God is offering is not God’s inability to see our innermost selves, but to be allowed to express it on our own without input, like a therapist who sits in his chair and doesn’t say anything for the whole hour. Just takes in our pain and our confusion and at the end, doesn’t offer any suggestions, because the point of the session is not to offer counsel, but to sit with someone as they use you as their sounding board, letting the healing come from inside themselves.

The hard part is doing what is required of us to be better people. God knows that what we’re wrestling with God over is not what to do to please God, but what to do to please ourselves, and that God will listen as we go through the ups and downs of falling into depths unknown and digging ourselves out. In short, “don’t try to be me. Be you.”

When my ex-wife, Dana, and I first moved to Houston, I talked in this blog about being embarrassed to come out in certain situations, that if people called Dana my “friend,” thee were times I wouldn’t correct them because I had to know my audience to feel safe. It was also a public Facebook comment, and my friend Erin changed my life. She talked about how, as a new mother, breast-feeding was very much a coming out issue, because she looked around to see who was watching before she sat to feed her child, or would make sure that her breast and her baby had blankets over them. She reminisced that she wished she had just been stronger, because feeding her child should have been her first priority and not the potential embarrassment. Then she said the words that made me bawl in the middle of a Whataburger… “just be you. Without a cover.” I started a journal not long after that, a hand-written one in my favorite medium, plain white notebook paper with water-blue lines, and wrote that quote on the back of the front cover so that I looked at it every day before I began to write.

I thought that making other people more comfortable was more important than being the affectionate mushball I am fully capable of being, because growing up in Texas had only reinforced my internalized homophobia and I was overly aware of where I was at all times. Erin freed me from my fear in most situations, because of course, there are rare instances when fears are completely “cured.”

It is the same when we are arguing with God. We try to cover up the things that we think will make God uncomfortable, not because God won’t talk about it, but because we won’t. If we made the commitment to talk about all of the things in this world that made us uncomfortable, we could be us… without a cover.

The biggest thing to remember in the words of Isaiah are the steps God wants us to take to be able to stop hiding. Instead of offering sacrifices to a higher being, God wants us to lead from the back.

Seek justice.
Rescue the oppressed.
Defend the orphan.

Arguing it out is going from the God-pleasing phase to the us-pleasing phase, because when we are constantly surrounded by people who need us and respond, that in and of itself is pleasing to God, because it is we as a people changing ourselves from the inside out, even when we do not see immediate results. Sometimes you’ll find yourself helping a little old lady across the street who doesn’t want to go, not realizing that you have “helped her to death.” But then you’ll meet that person in the street who’s lost the light in their eyes, and you see it, and you stop to talk because it has become a mind worm that you cannot ignore… “what can I do to help? What can I do to become the person that God wants me to be?” Because helping that person is helping God.

It is something that Jesus was sent to reinforce.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

I am not a huge fan of the “Daddy in the sky” argument, because I lean much more toward God being in us and around us, the chord that connects one being to another. However, I cannot throw the baby out with the bathwater, either. Jesus is saying quite clearly that it is not the giving of sacrifices and the ever-present drive to please God that will get you any favors. It is looking around your world and truly seeing it. How often do we walk past the homeless and think, “someone else will take care of them,” or worse, “if I give them money, they’ll just spend it on alcohol?” Seeing the world around you does not include sitting in righteous judgment.

I was reminded of this last week when my dad and I were driving around DC, and a homeless man scared the life out of me by knocking on the passenger window in the pouring rain. I jumped out of my skin, and my dad rolled down his window. The man walked around to the other side of the car, and my dad pulled out a couple of ones and handed them over. He remembered another great “Tiffany Talk,” where Dr. Anthony said that she didn’t want to reach the end of her life and say that she had money, but she hadn’t given it away. Her exact words, if I remember right, were, “I have two dollars.” I am not sure where “the great physician” falls on the spectrum of Christianity, but what I do know is that is the most Christ-like thing I’ve ever heard anyone say.

As someone who genuinely believes that it takes a lot of mental illness to be homeless in the first place (because regardless of housing prices, the longer you live on the street, the easier it is to succumb to the madness of your own mind), I have no right to judge how that person ended up in the rain asking me for money. I have never given anyone money on the street, but I have bought plenty of McDonald’s for the homeless downtown. But in terms of money, I’ve changed my mind.

I have two dollars.

Today’s Epistle comes from Hebrews, another piece of social justice writing that stands out as part of our journey toward wholeness… “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.”

It may not seem like social justice at face-value, but let me make my case. I have no idea what happened with that two dollars in the rain. Perhaps it went to a PBR tallboy, but perhaps it went towards a package of diapers or a can of formula. If I constantly believe the worst in people, I am less likely to give over my hard-earned money. However, if I let go of my preconceived notions, I am able to help bring the kindom to fruition without being able to see it happening, just knowing that it is possible. We walk by faith and not by sight, because those two dollars may not change the person on the street, but the point is how much it changes me to give it. I don’t have to control the two dollars once it’s out of my hands, but I have the power to take it out of my pocket.

It is a sacrifice pleasing in God’s sight, leading by serving… changing ourselves so that we see past me, myself, and I. In this world, it is seemingly becoming more and more impossible. We’re busy, first of all. We walk with our heads down, staring at our phones for another. We are rarely other-aware and not for malice… just plain ignorance.

In both our Old and New Testament readings, the invitation is to LOOK UP. LOOK OUT. Because when we do, we have the ability to be the most Christ-like, because it’s hard to walk by racism, oppression, homelessness, tragedy in all things. God does not want your expensive sacrifices, but the ones that cost the least financially and the most emotionally.

When we are ready and willing to walk by faith and not by sight, we are trusting that God has the ability to bless us the way we are blessing others, without keeping score.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

I have a confession to make. I didn’t start watching James Bond films until Tim Dalton in “The Living Daylights,” so I haven’t seen “Goldfinger.” So when Danni told me that Pussy Galore was quite possibly the hero of the entire film, I knew that she was talking about a “Bond Girl,” but other than that, I was out. So we made a deal. I’d watch “Goldfinger” if she’d watch “Goldmember.” It’s a fair trade, no?

Dan asked me to watch Goldfinger from a feminist perspective, and wanted to know whether I thought the interaction between Galore and Bond was entirely consensual. I just want her to see Michael Caine as Austin Powers’ “fahjah.”

I did laugh walking through The International Spy Museum when I learned that Goldfinger’s first name is “Auric.” It reminded me of my favorite campaign slogan, “AuH2O.” Not that I would have voted for Goldwater, just a great campaign slogan nonetheless. I take clever where I can get it.

So, I just got home from H Street Country Club, so named because it’s a bar with a putt-putt course on the second floor. I was terrible at it, but had a great time… mostly because everyone else was just as good as I was. The thing I love about hanging with Dan is that in addition to making friends with her wife, Autumn, she’s introduced me to so many people. I found my friend Jill’s doppelganger, and her name is Lindsay. Beat that with a stick.

We had this one conversation that doubled me over in laughter. Danni and her friend Traci are both soldiers (although Dan isn’t active duty- she works at State) who basically look like young boys, as do I. I don’t remember how we got on the subject, but we started talking about carding, and I told them my personal triumph of getting carded while buying Sam’s cigarettes. Traci said that she was once told to get out of the deep end of the pool, because you had to be 16. And then Dan hit the home run, when she said that she’d been mistaken for Autumn’s son more than once.

She came in Kings full over Aces, and I just had a busted straight.

It’s been amazing taking all of this new context I’ve been given to work with over the past few years and incorporating it into my daily life. For instance, I can honestly say that I am excited to be Dan’s friend, that I am enjoying taking the chance of being vulnerable and getting close to someone (as much as I can, anyway) without the undercurrent of anything. What I give is what I get, and what I am giving is glowing friend-love, and it is returned. I love that she remembers past conversations and checks in with me to see how I’m doing, without any agenda except genuinely, “how are you?” We’ll still be able to e-mail while she’s in Russia, but no personal comms other than that… so no Facebook, etc. Too much security risk, as you can imagine. The trip is entirely UNCLASS, but that doesn’t mean she gets to check in wherever she goes, either.

To send her off, we all agreed to do a shot, which led to another interesting conversation. I said, “do we want shots, or shooters? My favorite shooter is a red-headed slut.” I think she missed the joke, but she’s strawberry blonde… and incidentally, that IS my favorite. She suggested B-52s. They were out of both Jaeger and Kahlua. So I said, “I think it should be some kind of STOLICHNAYA!” It was really funny to me to say it because I have a horrible Russian accent. In the end, we just had orange Stoli and cranberry juice, a toast to Russia and friendship.

I feel like this entry is jumping around a lot, but that’s probably because I don’t drink much alcohol and I spent most of the night drinking Sugar Free Red Bull and Diet Coke. I’m going to pay for that, I’m sure. Reminds me of the night I went to a bar with AA friends where I proceeded to drink eleven Diet Cokes in a row. I think I was wired for two days after that…. I plan on going to church tomorrow if I can get some sleep in between now and then. If I don’t, I’ll probably write about the scriptures myself. I can fall asleep preaching to myself just as easily as I can fall asleep to someone else. 😛

And on that note, I think it’s time to read for a bit and hope I get tired. Amazon gave away “A Girl Named Zippy” by Haven Kimmel for free the other day, so I got that and bought one of her other novels, one of my favorite books of all time, called “The Solace of Leaving Early.” There’s a sequel to Zippy out now, but I reasoned with myself that I actually need to read some of the books on my Kindle before I add new ones. I’m not finished with Hamilton, but I did finish Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I have a one word review… Meh.

There was one scene that ripped my guts out, and the rest I could take or leave.

Speaking of leaving, have a wonderful trip, comrade. I’ll be eagerly awaiting your return. Your requested review of Goldfinger is on its way…. as soon as I actually sit down to watch.

There’s nothing better than arriving to work in the morning and seeing that everything is your own. Except for the trash being empty, nothing has been touched, and it looks exactly as I left it. It is home-away-from-home in the best sense of the term. Though I enjoy occasionally working from home, there’s no percentage in it. I am not more comfortable at my own desk, except that I type faster on that keyboard. Other than that, there are too many noises… dogs barking, clothes washing, things crashing to the floor as my elbow hits something inopportune. I learned this during “Snotorious B.I.G,” “Snowpocalypse Now,” and “Thanks, Snowbama.” Even though at the time I had an officemate, it was companionable silence, just the right amount of social interaction to remain isolated, but not too much. I just called for references on a new hire, so maybe she’s going to move in with me. Here’s hoping.

I do my best work when it’s quiet, and knowing that about myself is half the battle (hail Cobra). The ADHD/PTSD in me cannot handle multiple people talking around me all at once, and when I keep my door open, I can hear people talking, but not loud enough to hear what they’re actually saying. Just background noise like Starbucks. Other times, I put my headphones on to get “The Mozart Effect.” It’s not always Mozart, but sometimes it is. I find that jazz begets the same fast-paced thought process. As I have said before, Jason Moran gets me through a lot of work days. Thanks, JaMo. You rock.

It is a miracle that I have landed on my feet securely in this move, considering how anxious and frightened I was when I got here. There was nothing I could do to reinforce the words with Argo that I didn’t need a thing from her, and this move was never about her. I needed to get away, start over, and be in charge of my own life. Dana was not dragging me down, but my thought processes when I was with her became completely different when I struck out on my own. I am sorry for every moment that I engendered negative emotions in both Dana and Argo, but I am not sorry that I moved to a place where no one knew me (Silver Spring, not DC). To me, it came across as pure ego that this move was all about Argo, because she’d stopped listening to me long ago and projecting her own thoughts onto me, as if her truth was more important than mine. Her feelings matter, but at the same time, they are perceptions, just as mine are of her. Thinking that you can read me just based on what I write is a mistake of gargantuan proportions, because even though I do express a wide range of emotions, that’s not the same thing as real reactions in real time. Then, and only then, would I accept her criticisms and attaboys as real, because my writing is based on that moment, and that moment alone. It’s one of the reasons I change my mind on my blog so frequently- each entry is just a snapshot. If it sounds like I’m speaking out of both sides of my face, it’s because time has passed and I may or may not still feel the same way. I waffle all the time because unlike a politician, I believe I have the right to change my mind… and honestly, that’s a lot of what’s wrong with politics, too. Waffling is seen as a negative thing, instead of the progress of evolution on an idea.

I made so many mistakes with both of them, but at the same time, I am not the monster Argo and Dana both made me out to be, and would know that if they’d bothered to get to know the real me instead of insisting that they were right and I was wrong… because even Dana, who’d known me forever and a day, didn’t take the time to get to know the me that was enmeshed in new context, didn’t want to hear about it, just ran away. So I did, too. Moving to DC was not exactly running away, though. For me, it was more like correcting a mistake I’d made long ago and dearly wanted to rectify. I felt like I was running toward a destiny, and not necessarily away from her- although it was a part. How could it not? I have never been good at enforcing emotional boundaries, and a physical one seemed like a good solution since Dana’s parents live here and it’s not like our tie was severed permanently unless we wanted it that way. I pictured our paths as perpendicular rather than parallel. So much more went into the thought process regarding this move than anyone will ever know, because they don’t want to hear it. The fake story is so much easier to swallow. I met this chick on the internet and decided to follow her in a grand gesture. In short, fuck that noise. If it were true, I wouldn’t be the success I am now. I’d just be a basketcase on the floor… and while the fights with Argo since I’ve moved have put me in that place at times, it is not an over-arching problem to deal with, just as it comes up. I am too busy to notice it otherwise. I came, I saw, I lost. End of story. Embarrassed and red-faced, but not unworkable.

But if that is the only thing I have to regret about this move, then I can handle it. I’ve made my own friends, have a job I love, and am embarking on the life I’ve always wanted to lead, minus the people who said I wouldn’t/couldn’t do it. I also have more of my own money than I’ve ever had before, because I prepared for it. I got a room in someone else’s house so I could live large on the cheap, and the salary that was shared between both Dana and me is all mine. I never minded sharing, but it’s nice to be able to decide how I spend every penny without worrying that there’s someone I need to check with before I spend it. It’s not a slam against Dana, just one of the plusses that comes with being single.

I’ve also lost friends along the way, because I wasn’t finished grieving and they were ready to start dating and I wasn’t. I won’t be ready for a long time, and I am okay with that. I want to be sure that I am well and healthy enough for it, rather than starting a relationship and realizing, “oh my fuck… what have I done?” First of all, I haven’t met that person that will accept me just as I am, where I am, that doesn’t want me to box up my grief and stop talking about it as if it doesn’t exist. If I can’t find that person, I need to be alone. Divorce is one of the most traumatic things that can happen to a person, and boxing all of those feelings allows me to feel even worse about myself because they eat me from the inside out. There will come a time when this part of my life is over, but it’s not there yet. Not only that, there’s no magic button I can push that will magically take those feelings away so I can move on unencumbered. There’s no way across the river that doesn’t include swimming in deep water, the kind that threatens to overtake you with the waves. It’s just that over time, the crests get smaller.

Things seem further away when I am working, and perhaps that’s why I spend so much time at the office. It feels like a good place to put my energy, because it is providing for my future without the weight of grief hanging around my neck. It also keeps me away from making mistakes in my personal life that I can’t take back, because I’m too busy to think about it. My friends are my lifeblood, and this weekend is a going-away party for Danni, who is going to be in Russia for the rest of the summer. I hope she’s back in time for my birthday (9/10), but if that’s not possible, my CEO is having a campout at his land in W. Virginia that weekend, and if I can stomach sleeping on the ground, I might go. 😛

I feel like a phoenix rising from the ash, knowing that I was the idiot who threw the first match… but perhaps it was a fire that needed to happen. My nothing box was too big, my action box too small. By the end, neither Dana nor I was healthy enough to be in a marriage, because we both needed to work on ourselves, first. I had to lose the dreams of chasing her around the nursing home, but those memories will always be precious to me, even if I end up chasing someone else. No new person in my life will put up with that shit, but at the same time, I don’t think it’s fair of said new person to make me erase the life that came before her… especially if we are at the stage where we are not exclusive and I am still working out my own shit. I would hope that even if I was exclusive with someone, I’d still be allowed to deal with my own shortcomings in my own way. I don’t want to be so together that we have all shared experiences, and not so apart that catching up takes a gargantuan effort. It’s different now that I’m almost 39. I don’t have the same relationship goals I had when I was 23 and 30, respectively. I can picture never getting married again. The main reason I married Kathleen was for health insurance, because I didn’t need a piece of paper to tell me that I loved her intensely.

It was the same with Dana. I didn’t need a piece of paper to tell me that she was the best friend I could love the rest of my life. I needed a piece of paper to show next-of-kin for things like hospitals in bum-fuck Egypt.

So, like the answer to everything else, it depends.

Right now, I just need to go back to work.

Today was a rainbow of HIPAA information, starting with everything I used working for the doctor, and ending with data security and integrity. I think it’s kind of funny that in the beginning, I was on one side of the spectrum, and now I’m on the other. I’m about halfway through my coursework, which seems ridiculously out of date, so I’ve been watching YouTube videos as well. Most of these laws were enacted in the early 2000s, with many, many addendums since. For instance, a security risk can be a floppy disk… which, I’m sure it is, but if you’re still using one, you’ve got bigger fish to fry than I do.

Also, I made sure to move all my black ops out of the Black Ops folder (I’m sorry, it’s going to be a while before I stop laughing about that one).

I forgave the film makers for it, though, because that would only be funny to a percentage of the population… the percentage that tells you A) don’t name a folder “Black Ops” and II) Don’t put it on your desktop. We were in a meeting the other day talking about customer-facing businesses, and I said I thought there was a lot of money to be made out of teaching older people how to use computers. They were like, “where would you even start?” I said, “how ’bout how a directory tree works so your mom doesn’t have 40,000 files on her desktop?” I got the laugh. I knew the room.

With my own mother, as a teacher she’s learned more about PowerPoint than I could teach at gunpoint. She called to ask me a PowerPoint question one day and I was completely flummoxed and told her to call Lindsay. I think I have used PowerPoint a grand total of three times since I’ve been using Windows.

On the flip side, I locked down her router and transferred all her files from one computer to the other, so I’m not completely useless. I know my limits, though, and slide transitions are one of them.

And, increasingly, I am not a Windows person anymore. I’m having to learn DOS all over again, because I haven’t used it since, like, fifth grade. If I’m on the command line, it’s all linux, all the time. Therefore, when I’m sitting at a Windows DOS prompt, it goes something like this:

C:\ ls ls dir

Kumar: You’re worthless.
Roldy: I’m not worthwhile.

If the prompt isn’t leslie@harrietjones:~$, I don’t know what to do except Google it. The only problem I’m having with linux right now is the video drivers for the VM. For some reason, all of the sudden Chrome doesn’t work anymore, and neither do Chromium or Opera. But I use Firefox for almost everything, so it’s ok. I have yet to find a video that won’t run on Flash 11.2, so the need to have Chrome is moot.

Yes, I tried Freshplayer. No, it didn’t work… probably because of the same video driver issue that’s got everyone else in knots, too. The VirtualBox message boards are full of people screaming because there’s no fix except to downgrade your software. Let’s file that under #nothappening

Looking forward to a very busy day tomorrow, and a weekend spent with friends. I still haven’t decided when I’m going to sit for my exam, because I have to know exact statutes and dates. If it’s open-note, I’m golden, because I’ve been writing it down over and over again trying to memorize it. There are two dates for everything, passage and implementation, possibly three because the rules are different for small health plans with less than 5 mil in revenue. All I can do is study as hard as I can, and I’ve passed every quiz so far.

Maybe a couple of days away from it will help, because I can think about it without cramming.

I also need a haircut. And my nails did. It may be time for hot pink.

Or not.

So, yesterday I told you that my supervisor wants me to be a Certified Health Professional butt-quick, so I’m working through the modules quickly in preparation for the exam. Some of it is interesting, a lot of it is not. Coming from a medical family, I have to take each one, but there are lots of things in the modules I’ve heard (and said) over the years. I was my stepmom’s assistant for two years at one point, and worked in the medical research branch at another. So right off the bat, you know the term IRB sends shivers down my back.

Everything is so precise, as it should be. If you break a HIPAA law unintentionally, the fine is still $100/incident. And in fact, fines in a civil suit can go up to 1.5 million… although that’s not per occurrence. That’s $10,000/incident not to exceed 1.5 million in a calendar year. Sufficed to say, if you are a covered entity, make sure your ass is covered as well.

I think that’s the end game of this course, that I’ll end up teaching my team what they need to know to be capable of handling protected health information. I can just see it now. “Pay attention or we’re fucked.” I’m paraphrasing.

My arm feels like it’s going to drop off from writing so much, but like I said yesterday, there’s just not the same retention of knowledge if I’m typing notes to myself. I just kept switching implements, hoping that something would get comfortable and stay there. Started with a pencil, then a ball-point pen, then a gel pen, which was the most comfortable but it was red. So I have, like, three pages of notes in red ink, and I’m not even sure I can read my handwriting under normal circumstances.

It’s already weird not having my dad here, no text to wake up to asking if I wanted breakfast at the hotel or Starbucks. No one to have dinner with, although truth be told, that is a good thing, because I eat ten times more when I’m out socially than I do when I’m alone. I think I ate half my weight in steak last night at Old Ebbitt Grill… and then we had cheesecake.

After dinner, we walked to The White House as they were shutting it down. They don’t let people just walk around it all night. I was lost imagining who might be inside and what they might be doing. Was it a quiet night, or was there a State Dinner? I am sure that the president is sleeping well, because as Napoleon once said, “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Or if he isn’t sleeping all that well, it’s not because of the election. I think Hillary has it in the bag unless Donald Trump drops out and the Republicans decide to pick someone sane and reasonable, but there aren’t too many of those Republicans left.

I would have a much harder time choosing between voting Republican and Democrat if the Republicans truly espoused the values with which they began… small government, personal freedom, etc. Now they’ve gotten into the practice of legislating morality as if you can police people’s bedrooms and public bathrooms just the same. Like, seriously. Who are you going to put in charge of checking? Wouldn’t that require MORE GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES? #jackass

But the government can’t be too small. Our society is too mobile for that. We get moved for all sorts of reasons, and their has to be a modicum of things that stay the same no matter where you live.

If we can manage Starbucks and McDonald’s in every state, we should probably be able to handle gay marriage and abortion as well…. it’s possible to be pro-life and pro-choice at the same time without the two interfering, because a real Republican would say, “pro-life is my choice, but I wouldn’t presume to legislate yours.” Pro-choice does not mean pro-death. People have been beating that dead horse for years, but all pro-choice means is “I am not an expert on your life.” As it should be.

I know that we already have gay marriage and legal abortion in every state, but Trump/Pence have threatened to take away both of these things, so one has to prepare for the approaching dystopia in case the stupid fucknut vote wins out over sanity. I am so proud of the middle-of-the-road Republicans starting to come out and say, “frankly, we didn’t sign up for this.”

I remember not being too fond of Barack Obama at first, either… called him “all hat, no cattle” for a very long time. And he turned out to be the best thing since sliced bread. So to all you Bernie-or-Bust wingnuts, you’ve forgotten the cardinal fucking rule. Support your party, because it doesn’t center around one person. Donald Trump thinks it does, but it doesn’t. Apparently, his answer to everything is either “me” or “fast.” He’s his own adviser, and he’s going to get everything done fast… without learning anything about the situation beforehand… and with his conservative Christian base totally ignoring things they’d never let anyone else get away with… like a wife that’s posed for Playboy. #familyvalues

I am not slamming Melania for posing. I couldn’t care less. It’s just that the party of family values is strangely silent on this issue. I would call Donald Trump a lot of things, but upstanding citizen who puts family first is not one of them.

And that’s all I got right now. I’m so tired I’m about to fall asleep on the keys. Maybe more tomorrow if I have time to write at SBUX. When I got there this morning, I realized I’d forgotten my drugs and had to go back and get them so I didn’t have to call in crazy to work.

But they’d definitely believe it. 😛

My day got slammed in a hurry. My supervisor came into my office and said, “I need you to be HIPAA certified in a hurry” and gave me his business credit card, because it was $1200 and he didn’t want to make me wait to get reimbursed. I finished the first module today, which basically talked about how HIPAA came into being and why it’s important… and basically boils down to “don’t be an idiot with other people’s information.” You know, like in Jason Bourne, where all the black ops files are located in a subdirectory named “Black Ops.” [Editor’s Note: I KNOW, RIGHT?] So for the next few days, I am in class and writing like a mad man, because typing doesn’t allow me the same retention of knowledge that handwriting does… even though it hurts my wrist way worse than typing at this point. I don’t know which client requires it at this point, but it doesn’t matter. This is a good cert to have no matter what I do with it.

I am lucky that I come from a medical family, because I already know the basics. This is just going to give me a much broader understanding of the working parts, and a deeper understanding of the details. For instance, HIPAA required that Congress pass legislation on privacy. Guess what? They didn’t. So Health & Human Services had to bat cleanup and wrote the policies themselves. Yet another illustration of why the opposite of progress is Congress.

The main part I’m interested in is EDI, or Electronic Data Interchange. This is a huge, huge deal as more and more doctor’s offices, medical clearinghouses, insurance companies, etc. switch to electronic records as opposed to paper charts, and provides a national standard for them. That way, doctors can more easily share information, because especially with databases, it helps for all the columns to be the same so that the records end up in the same format across offices and billing, especially with Medicare and Medicaid.

So far, the questions in the quiz seem easy. I’m wondering if I will feel that way about the official exam. I’m going to Google around and see if there are practice exams I could look at/take before I sit for the real one. Luckily, the lessons are not timed, and I can take the quizzes as many times as I want to reinforce learning. Today I got 7/8 right, which is passing, but not great. When there’s only 8 questions, that’s a 75. I don’t do well with “not perfect.”

The difference between the quizzes and the test is that if I get under 75%, it’s another $3-400 to retake. So I am studying very, very hard and taking it seriously.

On the plus side, I am too busy to think about anything else.

Some of these I took, some of these, my dad did. The “butt plug of justice” is from The International Spy Museum. The concept of the spy museum is pretty cool. You pick out an alias and are asked questions at different checkpoints to see how much you remember about what you’ve been told. Out of 15 questions, I missed one… but I don’t know which one. All it said was that I’d raised a little suspicion, but it wasn’t enough to keep me and I’d accomplished the mission.

My cover was an 18-year-old boy named Colin Walker (whom I picked because I thought, “why not?”), an art student from Brosely, England. I was flying into Ankara for two weeks on “vacation,” but really to meet my contact and get a microdot out of the country by asking him about the view from the Eastern Tower. I didn’t know that they were just going to be questions on a computer screen, so like a jackass I tried to figure out an English accent on my way ’round the exhibits, tried to figure out mannerisms, etc.

There was quite a lot of fiction and reality- spy gear from discarded CIA/KGB/Mossad/FBI/Nazi/etc. use and an extensive Bond collection. There were also great videos throughout the place of former CIA/FBI operatives talking about their most “Bond” moments, because of course what you see in the movies is punched up for entertainment and not necessarily just information-gathering… but still, there are plenty of operatives that do dangerous/crazy shit that makes the hairs on your arm stand up. I don’t want to tell you what they are because then if you go to the museum, you’ll already know what happens!

My dad and I went from there to Madame Toussad’s, where I saw some very interesting “people…….”

Today, we went on a tour of National Cathedral after worship this morning, but I hardly remember anything except singing with my dad.

…except in this play, I know he shows up.

I’m really excited that my dad chose to spend part of his “summer vacation” with me, and I’m hoping it happens with my mom and dad more often now that they’re both retired and both love DC as much as I do.

I will never forget our first trip here together, when I was eight. I think I’ve said this before, but the trip started off with a bang because my mom gave me a copy of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby, Age 8 for the plane, and when we landed, I learned that DC was a walking city. I don’t think I’d ever walked more in my life up to that point, and one experience I will never forget is wearing a peppermint dress, white pantyhose, and kid-sized white Mary Janes and how much it hurt walking from the Metro to the White House. For the uninitiated, Mary Janes are chunky heels made of leather and hatred.

My favorite, as I’m sure it is for all kids, was the Air and Space museum. Living in Houston, you grow up imbued with the idea that everyone can become an astronaut. As you can probably tell, I did not. I didn’t, however, think that I wouldn’t. Not at that age, anyway.

My sister and I both love space. For the longest time, she wore a James Avery space shuttle charm around her neck, and I was not surprised that when her car arrived in Maryland for me to drive, there was a NASA sticker in the back window. We both have been to Johnson Space Center many times, and I have two favorite experiences of it. The first is that when I was in 7th grade, I went to a math and science magnet school (even though I’m good at neither… it’s a long story) and we did a flight simulation. The second is that Kathleen’s father was the assistant CFO at JSC, and he took us on a tour of the place that not many people get to see… although my sister has also gotten the full treatment having worked in the Mayor’s office.

(As an aside, one of Ralph’s (former father-in-law) favorite jokes was that he started at JSC as a junior in college and retired at 65 and I-45 was under construction the entire time… not sure that’s a joke, really.)

So, walking through the Air and Space museum is amazing no matter how many times I go, although I haven’t been at all since I’ve been here this time around. I’ve branched out. Now my favorites are the National Portrait Gallery and the Zoo, when it’s not too hot. Although what’s really funny about the Zoo is that the entire time Kathleen and I lived here, the panda enclosure was closed. Then, when I got here this time, it was closed again, so I still haven’t seen the pandas as an adult, even though I believe it is open now. One of my favorite kid memories, though, is seeing Ling Ling and Sing Sing… at least, I think that was their names. It’s been 30 years now and I am too lazy to look it up. The new panda is named Shu-Mai or something like that (kidding- the panda is not a shrimp dumpling).

The animals I can never get over are the giraffes. I don’t know why, but they fascinate me. Maybe it’s because I’m short, so they seem even more majestic. Who knows? Anyway, I could watch them for hours if given the time… just not when it’s over 90 degrees outside. Neither of us want to be outside in that heat. That’s the thing about the Zoo. If you go in the dead of summer, most of the animals aren’t stupid. They’re either hiding in the shade or in the A/C. The elephant enclosure can be walked through on the A/C side, but my aversion to bad smells keeps me from walking through it, because I am deathly afraid of throwing up in public… a very real possibility when there is dung involved.

Because of the air conditioning, I love the reptile house. I am not a big snake fan, but air conditioning and I are tight. Although if I had to pick a favorite, I like the albino ones. There’s something about their pure, pearl white that speaks to me… and reptile skin is all beautiful, even through my fear. I love the bright colors, even the deep browns and blacks of the pythons.

Speaking of which, I read an article about a woman who slept every night with her python and took him to the vet when he stopped eating and they told her “that’s because he’s preparing to eat you.” People are way weirder than animals at the Zoo. Write it down.

Switching topics entirely, the Facebook “Memories” section made me laugh today at one of my own jokes from last year. “It’s summer in Maryland, which makes me feel like a teenager… in that my face is broken out and I read magazines a lot.” I’m funny when I want to be.

And on that note, I am going to drink coffee and continue waiting for my dad. It’s a good day to be a Lanagan.

As I have gotten further and further away from the Argo situation, I have realized just how bad technology sucks. This is not a slam against either of us, because for a time, writing to each other over the internet was good and healing for both of us… in fact, right up until it wasn’t. I learned so much from that experience that now, when I meet people online, I want to get together immediately. I do not want people to only know my writer personality, because I want people to see the real me instead of the face I present to the world… and it’s easy to craft a narrative rather than creating friendship in real time… because that’s what I do. I craft narratives just as easily in letters as in blog entries, without even realizing I’m doing it. It comes from the Southern storyteller in me, not from a place of malice, but from a place of connection with beautiful words… especially when people write beautiful words in return.

But that also leads to not being able to see actions/reactions in real time, which is often much longer than letters would take to reveal even a fraction of myself. I am not scared of revealing who I am over text, and terrified of meeting people in real life. Meeting new people is my step out of my comfort zone, because I tend to stutter and stammer my way through the awkwardness of not being able to “think in longhand,” and reach for my delete key. One of the blessings of having been married to Dana is that she was spectacular at running interference in these situations, often making it more comfortable for me to relax and open up. She has always been more outgoing than me, because as I’ve aged I’ve gotten more insular and introverted. But I will talk and laugh and joke when given “an opening.”

Now that we’re divorced, I find myself running my own interference, and I’m not as bad at is as I thought I might be. When I saw Danni & Autumn for the first time, there was a connection that immediately felt like we’d known each other for a long time. It was the same with Scales, because we opened up to each other on our first outing, and it only got better from there. She and the Colonel have been traveling a lot, so I haven’t gotten to see them nearly as much as I’d like, but they are hysterical and I can’t wait to see them next time.

Alternatively, going to the party for Pri-Diddy & Elena was wonderfully bittersweet. They’ve moved their transition to living in Colombia up to October, and have signed a six-month lease, because they figure that’s enough time to see if they really like it there. I am sure there will be a lot of Skyping involved, because it will allow me to see where they really live instead of just wondering. Plus, I was comforted by the fact that when I looked for deals on Kayak, flying to Bogata is not that expensive. $300 for an international flight is not bad at all, especially if I have a layover in Houston long enough to meet my family for lunch.

I just told them I wanted to eat my way across Bogata. They were good with that. 🙂

However, Skyping just isn’t the same as being able to reach out and hug Pri-Diddy, those healing moments between friends… and at the same time, I am banking on the fact that living in Colombia won’t last forever, and I will still be here when they get back… because of course I will. DC is home, and again, it should have been all along. I wouldn’t have met Dana unless our paths had crossed here, but I believe in a fate that would have made it happen had our relationship truly meant to be.

In fact, when Dana came to DC for her birthday, it was pride weekend, and I asked Dana if she wanted to come with Pri-Diddy and Elena and me. Originally, she said “yes.” But then she changed her mind, and it gutted me. But that’s what happens when you break up. Gutting happens.

It was strange marching without her, but comforting to have my friends around me. As Prianka said at the time, “look around. This is all for you.” I was in a very bad place, and it lifted me up in ways I’ll never forget.

It gave me the strength to want to get out of my comfort zone, to branch out and meet new people so that I had a solid base of friends here that was more than just the few people I interacted with from work at ExxonMobil. Outside of work, I just didn’t have much of a safety net, because I had a partner. We spent most of our time alone, a big factor in wanting to move away from DC in the first place, because I’d met Diane’s friends and I really liked them. I went for a visit and Diane said, “you look really happy here. Maybe you should look for a job.” So I did. Integrating was easy because of Bridgeport and the people I’d met over the years of visiting Diane & Susan. But as it turned out, they only liked being around me in small doses, and moving there was a different proposition entirely.

I realized I’d made a mistake in not trying to create the support system in DC I’m creating now when it was 2002. When I thought of DC, the first descriptive adjective was “awe.” My favorite drive in the free world was from my house into the city, because I started at the Pentagon and as I got closer to the city on 395, all the monuments presented themselves to me at once. Getting stuck in traffic was just an excuse to sit there and gawk at true majesty.

Living on the Maryland side, I can’t see all of that as I am driving in, but it means something to me that the easiest way to get from my house into the city is 16th… as if I could just arrive at Pennsylvania and wave.

Plus, the best part of living in DC over Portland is that people actually want to come and visit me. My dad arrives this weekend, and we are trying to think of spectacular things to do.

On Saturday, we are touristing all day- The Spy Museum, The Newseum, Madame Tussaud’s, and ending up at the Reagan building for a Capitol Steps show. I love being a tourist in my own city. It’s like, my favorite thing ever.

But again, the spectacular just doesn’t matter. It will be nice to see his face in real time.

Because as I have learned, that means so much more than an e-mail.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Jesus was tired and a bit burned out on Judaism… not because of his lack of faith, but because of his exhaustion on the focus given to the law. For him, knowing God was not an endless repetition of facts, but a feeling of connectedness that would not and did not stand up to judicial scrutiny. For Jesus, it was enough that you tried. It was enough that you kept going. It was enough that you recognized your own sin and if you walked away from it, that it would mean more than anything a trial would have proven. Jesus knew something that other Jews did not; there would never be a time in which you could legislate someone into perfection. People are going to do what they’re going to do, and if they choose to walk in darkness, that’s an “up to them sort of thing.” Jesus never advocated punishment, but an invitation to rehabilitation.

The main thought that runs through all of Jesus’ parables is simple: if you invest in yourself, you will reap the rewards. He believed that if you started walking in light, you would want to continue, and that would be the path to enlightenment rather than continually harping on someone’s sins until they wanted to be right with God because someone else wanted them to be instead of claiming promise for themselves.

Changing for someone else is short-lived, while making your own changes last a lifetime. In short, in order to get peace, you have to want it… and wanting it makes all the difference. It is why I believe that most people drop out of conservative denominations. Fear-based theology just isn’t working for them anymore. Shame is a terrible thing, and conservative theology only reinforces it. In conservative theology, there is only a comfort zone about thisbig, and if you stray from it, you are destined for an eternity of burning in hell. It is legislating morality using the same tactics that the orthodox Jews used before them.

It is an ideology that I do not understand, because Jesus freed us from Talmudic law, choosing to forgive sin rather than berate it based on some infraction or another, because it does not endear people to you, but allows them to hide in their shame… it’s just “easier” that way. There is no path shorter to internal conflict than stuffing down your sins and trying to run away from them. Where people think it’s easier is that they don’t have to talk about them, don’t want to talk about them, want to keep sin locked away in a box without realizing that they are internally poisoning themselves… because eventually, the box leaks. What we have done and left undone comes out subconsciously in the way we treat people. We do not like ourselves for it, so why should anyone else?

Our ability to receive love is stepped on, even if we are capable of giving it.

Our ability to see magnificence is marred by our own troubled pasts.

What would it mean to let go? What would it mean to acknowledge our flaws and failures so that they did not continue to dog us in the night? What would it mean to our collective self-esteem if we were continually able to forgive ourselves for our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us?

Forgiveness is not a one-time thing, but a never-ending proposition in our humanness. Thinking of hell as a very real place and hoping not to go there is different than recognizing fallibility, because once you process it, you have walked through it rather than skipping over, because the skipping over is the hell part. Why worry about eventual hell rather than abating the hell that’s already here?

When I was five, I lived in Galveston, Texas, where my dad was the associate pastor of Moody Memorial UMC. The parsonage was on Pine St., and I quickly made friends with the kids on my street… including Amber Cantini, one of the most persistent people I have ever met in my life, which is saying something, since I was in kindergarten at the time. Every day, she would walk up to our house, and knock so loud that the neighbors could have heard it. Just “BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM!!!” until somebody came to the door. God forbid we weren’t home, because she’d just keep at it. Amber learned at an early age what Jesus was trying to tell us in today’s parable… knock and the door shall be opened unto you… but I think the severity of Amber’s knock would still have thrown Jesus for a loop.

Today’s gospel focuses on hospitality.

And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, `Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, `Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

The setup for this story is that it was not unusual for travelers to arrive in the middle of the night, because it was easier to move in the shadows while the Middle Eastern sun was not beating down on their backs… and in that culture, hospitality meant everything. Travelers had shown up after the day’s bread had been eaten, and when people show up, you don’t just give them a loaf of bread. You give them a full spread… not to do so was an embarrassment. The man going to his friend’s house and knocking like Amber Cantini was deeply rooted in fear. In desperation, he kept at it until he’d woken up the whole house and the friend finally relented.

At face value, the moral of the story might be “annoy people until you get what you want.” But as we take a deeper look, the man’s friend took care of him and didn’t allow him to be embarrassed because once he was “woke,” he understood the problem… even if he was initially aggravated.

Pachelbel’s Canon in D is playing in my head as I think about the next verses:

So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.

It is one of the few verses in which I have memorized in paraphrase, because the classic song fits into the aforementioned Canon:

Seek ye first the kingdom of God
And his righteousness.
Knock and the door will be opened unto you
Allelu, Alleluia….

I used to sit at my mother’s piano and play that mashup for hours, because it’s one of the only things I know how to play… but if I was only going to learn one thing, is it not a good one?

People by nature are not mind-readers, and you’ll never get anything you want from them by wishing. In order to get something, you have to ask… and sometimes repeatedly. However, it is on us to decide whether we are asking the right questions. If you need something from someone, is it a path to darkness or to light? Are you the type friend that will answer the door when you are called to serve? That last question may be the difference between a “yes” and a “no.” It is our job to know when the balance of power in a relationship is off or not… whether we are asking something of someone that we ourselves would not do for them.

It is the point of the Lord’s prayer to turn us outward, so that when we knock, we are not saying, “take care of me, because this is all about my needs.” Jesus does not specifically talk about reciprocity in this parable, but living in community requires it. I would like to think that reciprocity is an extrapolation… that when you’re the one with the bread woken in the middle of the night, you will have the ability to understand the problem and give equally, even if you are initially annoyed.

The law cannot cover brotherly love, nor will it ever. You cannot force someone to take care of you when you need it, even when you know you would take care of them if the tables were turned. Because in that moment, your friend may not know that. It is stepping out on a ledge to trust that if someone comes to you for help, you can also go to them… that they will remember the kindness you extended and reciprocate.

However, it is our ability to forgive ourselves when we ignore the world’s ills and try to do better that counts. The will to keep going is the “it gets better” campaign of our lives, and that is all that Jesus requires.

We fall. We get up. We learn. We fall again. We get up. We learn.

It’s an ongoing resurrection, whether you can see it or not.

Amen
#prayingonthespaces